Sympathy, madness, and crime
Subtitle: how four nineteenth-century journalists made the newspaper women's business
By: Karen Roggenkamp
Contributors: Kent State University. Press
Publisher: The Kent State University Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 168
ISBN-13: 9781606352878
Subjects: Press; Women in journalism; Newspaper publishing; Women journalists; Journalism; History
Other titles: How four nineteenth-century journalists made the newspaper women's business
Description: "In one of her escapades as a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, the renowned Nellie Bly feigned insanity in 1889 and slipped, undercover, behind the grim walls of Blackwell's Island mental asylum. She emerged ten days later with a vivid tale about life in a madhouse. Her asylum articles merged sympathy and sensationalism, highlighting a developing professional identity--that of the American newspaperwoman. The Blackwell's Island story is just one example of how newspaperwomen used sympathetic rhetoric to depict madness and crime while striving to establish their credentials as professional writers. Working against critics who would deny them access to the newsroom, Margaret Fuller, Fanny Fern, Nellie Bly, and Elizabeth Jordan subverted the charge that women were not emotionally equipped to work for mass-market newspapers. They transformed their supposed liabilities into professional assets, and Sympathy, Madness, and Crime explores how, in writing about insane asylums, the mentally ill, prisons, and criminals, each deployed a highly gendered sympathetic language to excavate a professional space within a male-dominated workplace"--Publisher's website.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 150-160) and index.
Table of contents: title: Sympathy and the American newspaper woman; title: Representing institutions: asylums and prisons in American periodicals; title: Scenes of sympathy in Margaret Fuller's New-York Tribune reportage; title: Entering unceremoniously: Fanny Fern, sympathy, and tales of confinement; title: Making a spectacle of herself: Nellie Bly, stunt reporting, and marketed sympathy; title: Sympathy and sensation: Elizabeth Jordan, Lizzie Borden, and the female reporter in the late nineteenth-century; title: Afterword.